“Shostakovich Trilogy” is an evening-long tour de force by Russian-born
choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. It’s outstanding for its theme: the tumultuous
reconciliation of a world-altering revolution and subsequent counter-revolution
with the career of Dmitri Shostakovich, a composer influenced by Igor
Stravinsky, whom music scholars have described as “polystylist.” Luminous
production values and inventive design reach for the magnificent. An allied but
not insignificant virtue is the work’s capacity to reveal San Francisco Ballet
Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson’s adroit eye for choosing dancers.
I remember once reading a description of Lincoln Kirstein’s determination to
round up talent for Ballet Society and its successor, New York City Ballet: “He
was like a babushka, off to market in her headscarf and shawl, carrying a shopping
basket on her arm.” With a few modifications, something similar could be said
of Tomasson. Many dancers in this
company start out fully in harness. Others stretch into their potential warily,
over time, or in fits and starts. Whatever it takes, whether coaching by
in-house ballet masters and guest stagers, or becoming clay in the hands of respected
and respectful choreographers such as Ratmansky, they ultimately find their depth by working from the inside
out to deliver the drama in legato works, comedy in character roles, all the
while improving technique in serial encounters with quick-twitch kinesiology.
“Shostakovich Trilogy,” staged by the incomparable Nancy Raffa, comes in three parts. Each adheres to an autobiographical tracing that coincides with the brutal counterrevolution undertaken by Joseph Stalin on the backs of Russia’s workers and farmers. Its tyranny paved the way for that multi-nation country’s ultimate return to the chaos of capitalism. Shostakovich, whose talents were initially recognized and promoted under the patronage of Soviet Chief of Staff Mikhail Tukhchevsky, became Stalin’s darling for an extended season, until the composer could no longer tolerate the regime’s imposition of Socialist Realism and censorship. Eventually he fell out of favor, resulting in suppression of his work.
In “Symphonie #9,” men in black cavort. Women in green
velvet cami dresses glissade into turns ending in syncopated bunny-hop jumps
hyping cloying enthusiasm. Joseph Walsh imports a youthful, buoyantly joyful
intensity and openness—presumably borne of the newly won freedom ignited by the
first five years of the 1917 Russian Revolution. He’s a bright light beacon. In
his four seasons with the company, Walsh has buffed up a distinct polish of his
own. Its purity of spirit harkens back
to the Gene Kelly era. At the same time,
he heat-seeks a full report from his partners. This evening his partner is Dores
André, who punctuates her Walsh- transported lifts with generous balloné.
Aaron Robison arrives channeling the seasoned, if darkly conflicted
Shostakovich. He and Jennifer Stahl push toward and away from each other to the
accompaniment of a flute. A frontier peopled by creeping dancers assembles
semi-clandestinely. As the ballet
orchestra’s strings add depth, Robison brakes several times, possibly marking breaches
when the revolution is successively deprived of the few remaining gains that have
blunted the impact of what Fidel Castro called out as “something worse than
capitalism,” the betrayal from within of an anti-capitalist revolution.
Ratmanksy has a gift for edging each pas de deux with a short repetition of its threading with a cache of ensemble dancers. They bear witness to each new historic context. Lenin liked to say that a good tailor measures seven times before he cuts. It could be said that Ratmansky secures each historic tapis he drapes on his protagonist’s shoulders with seven layers of top stitching. Nobody leaves the house unbound to this historic work!
Wei Wang stakes his claim to the front burner with
contender-level attack and bravura. Set designer George Tsypin has made his stunning
contribution with a jigsaw-fractured line drawing drop. It’s a rendering of a tight
assemblage of official onlookers, a Stalin-chiseled Mount Rushmore, in the
socialist-realist style. Owing to ingenious design and construction, it can’t
excuse its fault lines as endemic to its genre, nor the subsets that collect
within it as it looms Bonaparte-like above the fray. It seems to lament, “The more
smugly we gang together, the more prone we are to revealing the chinks in our
armor.”
In “Chamber Symphony,” Ulrik Birkkjaer dances a beleaguered first-person litany
of grievances. His interpretation brings to mind what audiences loved about the
world-renowned Jorge Esquivel’s Albrecht when he partnered the Cuban National
Ballet’s Alicia Alonso in “Giselle,” a seasoned, present, and indefatigable
virility. Sasha De Sola, Mathilde Froustey, and Yuan Yuan Tan dance the roles of
the women in the composer’s life. Froustey, as the wife who dies, raises the
couple’s temperature until it brings about her abrupt downfall and demise. She
shapes an arc that balances polarized valences to liberate a specie of passion
that is contradictorily lofty and recklessly
visceral.
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The final panel in the triptych arrives on a palette of Bolshevik red,
challenged by a grim Stalin-tinged grey, and is danced to the composer’s
best-known work, “Piano Concerto #1.”
Sofiane Sylve pairs with Wona Park, a guest artist from Boston Ballet,
who in her January Gala appearance elicited shrieks and applause from an
audience brought to its feet. Outfitted in matching Russian Red swimsuits, the
two fiery women light up the night. Sylve scintillates; Park nukes. With partners
Carlo Di Lanno and Angelo Greco in their thrall, and orchestra conductor Martin
West leading the charge, they dance a cataclysm of unfettered rebellion under a
stabile representative of a life’s reliquary during a double-edged era.
Toba Singer